Mid-East's painted borders begin to blur

Chief foreign correspondent

On parade: A volunteer in the "Peace Brigades" in the southern holy Shiite city of Najaf. Photo: AP

Washington: Was it ironic, or simply macabre, that former US vice-president Dick Cheney put his head above the parapet this week, to observe of Barack Obama’s handling of Iraq: “Rarely has a US President been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many”?

Maybe. Cheney is the bloke who knew that Iraq just had to be invaded in 2003 because of Saddam Hussein’s stockpiles of WMD. Yet it would be churlish to demand that he butt out of the debate, because Cheney knows a thing or two about Iraq – here he is in 1994, at length and presciently: “Once you got to Iraq and took it over, and took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq you can easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off. Part of it the Syrians would like to have to the west. Part of eastern Iraq, the Iranians would like to claim, fought over for eight years. In the north you’ve got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. It’s a quagmire.”

We’ve been talking about bits and pieces of Iraq flying off probably since the day after Britain’s Mark Sykes and France’s François Georges-Picot struck a deal on how to carve up the region should the Ottoman Empire collapse as a result of World War I.

Their map has a wonderful old-world charm, with its colour-washed spheres of influence – French (blue), British (pink), Italian (green) and two others, Russian and ‘international’ (which are slightly different shades of a mustardy hue). And of course, there are areas A and B which are identified as ‘independent Arab states’ – A, which was to become Syria being in the French sphere; and B which became Iraq in the British sphere.

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More recently, we’ve had the Ralph Peters map – a former American military officer who chopped up the whole region in an effort that was published in the US Armed Forces Journal in 2006. Peters happily dismembers Iraq, but Syria, Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia too.

The latest map offering comes from ISIL – the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant – an Iraqi-led al-Qaeda spin-off that has joined with other Iraqi Sunni militias and international volunteers to take cities in the north of Iraq and to set their sights on Baghdad and beyond.

The term ‘perfect storm’ is overused, but how else to describe this heady mix of geopolitical enablers for the chaos in today’s Middle East – the Cold War ends; the development of alternate energy sources diminishes the strategic value of the region; Washington insists on the strategic brilliance of invading Iraq; the Arab Spring comes and goes, rendering Syria and Libya ripe for dismantling; and Washington’s hand-picked Shiite leader Nouri al-Maliki effectively disenfranchises the country’s significant Sunni minority.

Not surprisingly, much of the debate about countries breaking up in the last decade focused on Iraq. Remember all the talk of a greenfields site for democracy in the Middle East, how it would be a multi-ethnic and sectarian model for how different types should get along in a fractious region?

But the construct with which the Bush Administration saddled Iraqis after leading the invasion that forced the collapse of the regime of Saddam Hussein was unsustainable – so it was only ever a matter of when, not if, we might see events as they are unfolding today.

Now three is the magic number. Wright sees Libya torn three ways by tribal and regional rivalries – he names these new countries Tripolitania, Fezzan and Cyrenaica. In Syria, the incendiary forces at work are sectarian and ethnic – Wright envisages the dictator Bashar al-Assad’s minority Alawites retreating to their ancestral lands in a mountain strip that hugs the Mediterranean and the Sunni regions in the east joining their co-religionists in the west of Iraq.

The big winners amid so much speculation are the Kurds – a band of Kurdish communities hugging the northern border of Syria will likely want to join the Kurds of Iraq in their economically booming semi-autonomous statelet in the north of Iraq. And if they do, what becomes of the Kurds in adjoining booming regions of Turkey and Iran?

If all the Kurds came together, they would be a nation of maybe 30 million.

Just as the invasion of Iraq has had unintended consequences for Washington, so too has Saudi Arabia’s support for the Sunni rebels in Syria.

Writing at New Eastern Outlook, analyst Alexander Orlov observes tartly that the "Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia and Qatar" did not understand that they would awaken national movements and exacerbate the age-old Sunni-Shiite conflict by escalating the Syrian conflict: “The redrawing of the map of the region is fraught with the collapse of the monarchies of Arabia and the replacement of their conservative regimes that observe the norms of 17th-century Islam with democratic governance by the younger generation.”

Barack Obama’s reluctance to involve the US in the implosion of the region – notwithstanding Thursday’s announcement that 300 American military advisers are being dispatched to Iraq – suggests a willingness to let the regional pieces fall where they may. Yet the thrust of the rhetoric from all sides in Washington and other Western capitals is that ‘stability’ requires the region to remain confined within its ill-fitting borders.

That was not the case in the days of Sykes and Picot. Their agreement is dated 1916 – it constituted forward planning based on a belief that the Ottoman Empire would have to be replaced by something. It was proactive, not reactive; and needless to say it was all about vested interests that had precious little to do with any real sense of a community of interest among the populations that were being herded within new frontiers.

Roxane Farmanfarmaian, a research fellow at London Metropolitan University’s Global Policy Institute was as prescient as Cheney, when she wrote in 2012 as Obama won election for a second term in the White House: “As Obama settles into the Oval office and casts his gaze again beyond US politics, he may well be reminded that few eyes were on the ball when the Arab uprisings appeared to erupt suddenly in the spring of 2011, catching pundits and politicians by surprise and repositioning Washington’s Middle East policies.

“Today, we may be at risk of the same inattention again – if we take our eyes off the ball now, we may miss the next big shift: a redrawing of the Middle East map that is triggering a new Cold War with Syria and Iran at its heart.”